ABUJA – Federal Government yesterday, confirmed to Nigerians that the country’s economy has gone into recession but that they were on top of the situation.

Fielding questions from senators on the State of the Nation, the Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun explained that the recession “is a short one” and that “we are going to come out of it”.

“Technically, we are in recession but, I don’t think we should dwell on definitions, I think we should really dwell on where we are going.

I think if we are in recession what I will like to say is we are going to come out of it and it would be a very short one because the policies that we have would ensure that we don’t go below where we need to go and I think with what we are doing we would begin to turn the corner”, she continued.

She announced that so far, N247.9 billion has been released for capital projects out of which, N22 billion is for transport and N21.9 billion for agriculture.

The minister further explained that N107 billion has been released to the Federal Ministry of Works and Housing out of which, N74 billion is for Works.

She added that N20 billion has been released to partly defray N65 billion unpaid arrears of fertiliser supplies to allow for improved imports.

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“The releases are fully cash backed; we have stopped the practice of releasing or approving releases that are not cash backing.

We have changed that process we now start from the position how much cash do we have and then we release appropriately. So, all releases are cash backed”, she stressed.

She however rgretted that due to declining Naira value, the country was in deficit of N4 billion, while N58 billion was currently trapped in the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) due to stringent laws.

“We have been borrowing largely from domestic market because we needed to get the exchange rate sorted out to enable us borrow from the international market.

The international borrowings will begin to come in the 3rd quarter; that is always our projections; we would take initial money from Nigeria as we sort things out and we go on the road to borrow internationally”, she noted.

Adeosun who fielded 28 questions from the Senators, refused disclosing the amount of money the President Mohammadu Buhari inherited from the last administration (Goodluck Jonathan).